1. Field
The present application relates to commercial lettuce harvesting, and, more particularly, to commercial lettuce harvesting for cup-shaped portions of heads.
2. Related Art
The commercial lettuce industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. Lettuce is produced and shipped year round in the U.S. with the source of supplies changing with the seasons, with California and Arizona dominating U.S. production.
Three types of lettuce dominate commercial production: iceberg, leaf lettuce, and romaine lettuce. Of these three types, iceberg lettuce makes up the majority of the commercial lettuce production in the U.S.
Lettuce is commercially planted as seeds or seedlings in rows in a field. Because lettuce heads tend to be somewhat irregular and delicate, commercial harvesting of lettuce is a manual process.
In conventional commercial lettuce harvesting, teams of field workers harvest lettuce in the field by hand. In particular, field workers referred to as cutters manually cut the stems of the lettuce using hand held harvesting knives. Field workers referred to as packers then pack the harvested whole heads into cardboard boxes, which are more commonly referred to as cartons. The cartons of whole heads are then placed on pallets, vacuum cooled, and then shipped to destination markets, where they are ultimately shipped to end users.
Certain end users, such as restaurants, may use only a portion of a whole head. This can result in various types of waste and costs associated with having shipped the whole heads to the end user. For example, there is waste disposal cost to the end user associated with the unused portions of the whole heads. There is the cost associated with shipping the whole heads to the end user, which included the cost of shipping the unused portion of the whole heads. Additionally, the end user incurs labor costs associated with processing of the whole heads. For an end user that uses a large volume of lettuce, such as a restaurant, the amount of waste and costs can be substantial.